Virtual hospital--a computer-aided platform to evaluate the sense of direction.

This paper presents a computer-aided platform, named Virtual Hospital (VH), to evaluate the wayfinding ability that is found impaired in senile people with early dementia. The development of the VH takes the advantage of virtual reality technology to make the evaluation of the sense of direction more convenient and accurate then the conventional way. A pilot study was carried out to test its feasibility in differentiating the sense of direction between different genders. The results with significant differences in the response time (p<<0.05) and the pointing error (p<<0.01) between genders suggest the potential of the VH for clinical uses. Further improvement on the human-machine interface is necessary to make it easy for geriatric people to use.